AWS CloudFormation and BitNami

Amazon has recently released AWS CloudFormation , a new service that helps you describe a ‘stack’ of cloud resources and bring them up as a single unit. A CloudFormation stack can include among other resources load balancers, databases, EBS volumes and of course EC2 instances. A stack definition is called a template and can contain configuration information to be passed to the various resources being provisioned.

At BitNami, we are pretty excited about CloudFormation and want to make it easy for you to incorporate BitNami stacks to your deployments. We have now CloudFormation templates for all PHP and Ruby on Rails BitNami apps. One way to look at this new functionality is that you can now easily combine BitNami applications as ‘lego blocks’ who can also be configured at launch time. The templates are for single-instance deployments, but we will be working to expand this functionality over time. The following wiki article explains how to launch a BitNami Stack CloudFormation Template using the Amazon Console.

If you are a CloudFormation and BitNami user, we will appreciate your feedback on how this works for you. If you haven’t done so, now is probably a good time to check our BitNami Cloud Hosting service We will continue to improve how BitNami integrates with different Amazon services and we have a lot of new features in the works, stay tuned!